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Wayne Law’s Blanche Bong Cook named scholar in residence at Berkeley Law

June 20, 2018

DETROIT – Assistant Professor Blanche Bong Cook, Wayne State University Law School’s nationally recognized expert on the prosecution of sex traffickers, has been named a scholar in residence at the University of California Berkeley School of Law.

Cook’s appointment is part of Berkeley Law’s Visitors in Residence program, which brings internationally recognized social justice practitioners, academics and leaders to Berkeley Law for an extended time to share their expertise. During her stay in mid-October, Cook will deliver a series of lectures that address the ways in which the law creates vulnerability for the purpose of both labor and sexual exploitation.

Her most recent paper, “Stop Traffic: Using Expert Witnesses to Disrupt Intersectional Vulnerability in Sex Trafficking Prosecutions,” will be published in the Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law next spring. The paper is the first of its kind and addresses the ways in which intersectional, feminist and other critical theories can be used to maximize the use of expert witnesses in sex trafficking cases.

Prior to joining academia, Cook was an assistant U.S. attorney with the Department of Justice, where she specialized in large-scale drug and sex-trafficking prosecutions. In that capacity, she briefed and/or argued more than 40 federal appeals.

Past scholars in residence at Berkeley Law include: Muneer I. Ahmad of Yale Law School; Devon Carbado of BruinX for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at UCLA Law; Sheryll D. Cashin of Georgetown University Law Center; Guy-Uriel Charles of Duke University School of Law; Richard Delgado of University of Alabama School of Law; Angela Onwuachi-Willig, incoming dean of Boston University School of Law; retired Justice Albie Sachs of the Constitutional Court of South Africa; Barry Scheck of Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law; and Robert A. Williams of University of Arizona Rogers College of Law.